The best that nation-states could do was adapt to planet-scale forces of capital, technology and migration. And part of that adaptation meant national identities would become more worldly and cosmopolitan. It would be a functional necessity to tolerate, even embrace, difference.

Jump-cut to now. Where some in a 60,000-strong crowd for a national anniversary in Budapest freely hold up posters titled “White Europe” and “Clean Blood”. Where ex-Trump advisor Steve Bannon, a self-proclaimed “economic nationalist”, addresses a French National Front rally with the words, “Let them call you racist… wear it as a badge of honour”. Where elements of the UK commercial press (and other pint-wielding provocateurs) describe domestic judges and MPs as “traitors” and “saboteurs”.

All of this underpinned by proclamations of national glory and tradition — more often than not deemed as under threat from a host of named and nameless “others”.

Understanding nationalism

Bewilderment is understandable. As are laments that this is a veritable retreat from the future. Yet at FutureFest, we try to set current developments in deep and wide contexts. As it extends outwards from now, the “cone of uncertainty” that futurologists talk about contains many thorny issues — and that means power, passions and asymmetries, as well as tidy and gleaming solutions.

If the call to nationhood is irresistibly on the rise, the future-minded should be thinking about how to turn its dynamics to the good.

What that might imply, to begin with, is an understanding of nationalism that is less phobic and alarmist than is (understandably) generated by the headlines.

In much political science, the assumption behind the term “nationalism” is that the qualities of the nation are the driving force of its ideology — just as the dynamism of capital propels “capitalism” or the primacy of social relations fuels “socialism”.

The anthropologist Ernest Gellner understood nationalism as a functional phenomenon. It was a means whereby industrialising territories established a common language, clock-time and other useful standards. It justified investing in education and welfare systems, in order to strengthen the capacities and character of the “folk”.

Now, 19th and 20th century nationalism could fall into preposterous myths of racial superiority, and provide a logic for imperial exploitation and the subjugation of others. But it could also — in, say, the Nordic countries — become a transformative spur for societal development in economy, culture, education and land ownership (as outlined in Tomas Bjorkman and Lene Rachel Anderson’s recent book The Nordic Secret).

Altruistic and narcissistic nationalism

What form of nationalism — with its “Janus” face, as Tom Nairn once called it, facing both forwards and backwards — is prevailing in the present moment? As reported in the Economist a few months ago, the Polish social psychologist Michal Bilewicz has made a useful distinction between “altruistic” and “narcissistic” forms of contemporary nationalism:

Altruists acknowledge a chequered past, give thanks for today’s blessings and look forward to a better future — a straight line sloping up across time. Narcissists exalt in a glorious past, denigrate a miserable present and promise a magnificent future — a rollercoaster U-curve with today in its pit… If you need a rule of thumb for assessing a nationalist movement, ascending ramp versus switchback U is as good as you are likely to get.

One might recognise the altruistic version in the small-nationalisms of Scotland and Wales, or the Catalonian independence movement, or even Macron’s forward motion for the French nation. These nationalisms are liberal and progressive. They are pro-EU or other transnational regimes, shouting ‘stop the world, we want to get on’.

Yet it would be fair to say the narcissistic form is currently dominant in Europe. The administrations of Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey — and the anti-immigration contenders in many other countries — do indeed combine these elements. That is: a glorious reading of their own history; a vision of a present society overrun by malign, polluting and external forces; and a future which restores national “Greatness”.

A post-Brexit UK looks like it’s trying to be both kinds of nationalism at the same time. Meaning a “Global Britain” that’s about to be freed from the exactions of European bureaucracy, in order to extend its national genius for democracy and industry around the world… so we are told. And as for Trump’s America? Well, as presidential tweet tumbles after presidential tweet, it’s difficult to tell.

“New nationalism” at Futurefest

In this year’s FutureFest, we’ve been trying to grapple with the full spectrum of creative (and destructive) forces shuddering through our lives at the moment. Our aim is to open up alternatives than can occupy the future in a confident way. The enduring appetite for collective identity has to be one path we explore. Which means taking nationalism seriously.

We’ve invited Professor Manuel Castells to dwell again on his remarkably prescient comments about the power of identity, made in his mid-90s trilogy The Information Age. Castells saw the interdependence of what he called “the Net and the Self”. Our networked, mobile and global existence is so demanding that it produces a need for a collective anchor in the storm; a more slow-moving resource of culture and history.

The narcissistic nationalisms previously mentioned indicate how this relationship can go badly wrong. Castells, himself Catalonian, will give us clues as to how it can be set right for the future. He will also be exploring these ideas in a conversation with Sir Nick Clegg.

Our panel on the “new nationalism” has a range of leading experts who will take “these islands” of Britain as their starting point. British Future’s Sunder Katwala has been conducting research on attitudes to Britishness since 2011 and Cambridge’s Michael Kenny is as interested in the nations that comprise the “United” Kingdom. As a leading scholar on cosmopolitan identity, the LSE’s Ayça Çubukçu will hold open a wider space in which a post-Brexit British identity can be explored.

A few decades ago, Benedict Anderson once described nationalism as an “imagined community” — a sense of connection with those who we will never actually, physically meet. How much of our virtualised, networked life does that concept also describe? How much of our future depends on how well we imagine our communities? What can the nations we craft teach us about how to invoke and locate the collective in our lives?

As ever, in one single FutureFest, many possible worlds.

Originally published by NESTA

Photo by alda chou

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Future architecture should look for ways of living (al)together, as all power structures and capitalist formations push us more and more away from each other. Merve Bedir talks with Future Architecture about her work, including the project Bostan: A Garden for All which she presented at the 2015 Idea Camp and for which she’d received an R&D grant.

Merve Bedir is an architect and researcher. Her research and practice is about urban transformation, migration and forced displacement and architecture education.

For more information on Bedir’s idea for Botan: A Garden for all, see here:

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Cross-posted from CommonsTransition.org, Carlos Delclós explores the gap between people and increasingly unaccountable institutions beholden to financial interests, citizens are rising up to reclaim the commons.

The ubiquity of social unrest and economic conflict in Europe tells us that we are living in times of intense contradictions.

Where streets have not filled up with massive protests calling for a more direct, participatory and meaningful democratic culture, ballot boxes are increasingly filling up with votes for post-fascist parties like the National Front or UKIP, whose voices are in turn amplified and over-represented by consistently high voter abstention rates.

Though many are looking to the rise of new parties like Syriza and Podemos for signs of hope, the gap between the idea of Europe as a common, borderless space of emancipatory potential and the threat of a Europe characterised by nationalist entrenchment remains a daunting reality.

Over the last few years, the Doc Next Network has been researching, documenting and playing in this gap, and building an archive of short, socially conscious documentaries and independent films in the process. During the first phase, called Remapping Europe, we explored the contours of Europe’s borders, whether these were internal between member states, external to the common area or inherent in the very idea of Europe.

We learned that borders are something we carry with us; they continuously shape the structure and texture of our surroundings by imposing and reproducing relationships of exclusion and exploitation. As the political and social theorists Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson point out, they are not mere obstructions of global flows of capital. Rather, they are the essential devices through which these flows are articulated, mediating social relationships and access to the most basic resources required to satisfy human needs, such as land, labor, money and knowledge, often referred to as “the commons”.

This insight led to the project’s next phase, called Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons, which looks at how borders operate at a more local level to enclose the commons and how those enclosures are being confronted and overcome. In this series of posts, we will present some of our results along with content from our Media Collection. By doing so, we will explore the challenges faced by ordinary people who are working together to produce an emancipatory horizon of self-organised and self-managed commons, free from the mediation of both the state and the market.

The challenges faced by these movements are many. The enclosure of the commons is not limited to the privatisation of public resources, though this is certainly one of the forms in which it takes place. Enclosure goes beyond the transfer of resources to produce two major tendencies: closing in and crowding out.

Think of the internet. Ostensibly, it is conceived to allow any user to connect with any other user or set of users anywhere in the world to exchange information in real-time. Many of us still remember how, around the turn of the century, several notable and enthusiastic intellectuals referred to an obliteration of the tension between time and space that would eventually lead to radically horizontal social relations. Of course, the reality of the internet is more complex than that.

In a recent essay, net artist and co-founder of the Geocities Research Institute Olia Lialina describes how the field of User Experience (UX) has changed the way people use the internet over the years. Premised around “scripting the user”, UX directs what information we consume, what users we relate to and how, eliminating clicks by relegating more and more processes to the back-end of websites and applications (where they run automatically) and directing those we do make through a streamlined, visually attractive front-end.

If we think of a company such as Facebook, the tendency towards enclosure becomes even clearer. In addition to information about the people we interact with, Facebook’s algorithms are constantly collecting data on our behavioural patterns, preferences and tastes. The algorithms, in turn, determine what stories we see in our feeds and what is marketed to us.

Each click determines the next several, reproducing and reinforcing our previously existing interests and shielding us from the influence of those whose interests diverge from our own. In this way, we are closed into increasingly specific interest groups and crowded out of a forum for interaction with a much more varied multitude. Meanwhile, people all over the world are coming to believe that Facebook actually is the internet, and more and more companies and institutions are submitting an increasing share of their social activity to the logic of a single company.

Urbanisation has remarkably similar effects, and that is because its goals are not much different than those of Facebook. Ultimately, the goal of urban planning is to direct social relations so that they are predictable enough to guarantee security, maximise profits and minimise conflict for flows of capital. The social ecologist Murray Bookchin realised this, and in The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, he proposed that urbanisation was ultimately at war against the historical notion of the city:

City space, with its human propinquity, distinctive neighbourhoods and humanly scaled politics—like rural space, with its closeness to nature, its high sense of mutual aid and its strong family relationships—is being absorbed by urbanisation, with its smothering traits of anonymity, homogenisation, and institutional gigantism.

The overwhelming scale of the process can even lead people to enclose themselves, as he went on to point out:

The result is that the ego itself tends to become passive, disembodied, and introverted in the face of a technological and bureaucratic gigantism unprecedented, indeed unimaginable, in earlier human history. Public life, already buffeted by techniques for engineering public consent, tends to dissolve into private life, a form of mere survivalism that can easily take highly sinister forms.

Bookchin also linked the emergence of a market economy, freedom of trade and industrial innovation in Europe to the development of roads, rivers and canals.

The French from ZEMOS98 on Vimeo.

Tellingly, while the latter were systematically homogenised, redirected and, in the case of the rivers, polluted, the former are precisely the elements that were prioritised throughout the development of the European Union, beginning with its roots in the European Coal and Steel Community.

While there is much to be said about his idealisation of rural communities and pre-capitalist society in general, reading The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship today is an illuminating experience. His agenda for community-based, libertarian municipal politics matches the demands of the radical democratic movements that took center stage in post-2011 Europe, while the Troika imposed austerity through the sheer force of its own “institutional gigantism”. And his critique of urbanisation resonates with the pathological geographies of the housing and construction bust of countries like Spain and Ireland.

NONCITY, an independent film by Nuno Pessoa and Andrea Fernández, captures Bookchin’s critique of urbanisation at the expense of the city as it follows two visitors wandering through Arroyo de la Encomienda, a Spanish ghost town on the outskirts of Valladolid left behind by speculative town planning and corruption. Its mayor resigned a year after being charged with bribery and obstruction, once he had been sentenced to three years of prison.

NONCITY from TNGNT on Vimeo.

We are beginning to see the cracks in the pavement. Seemingly small gestures can provoke widespread revolt, whether it is cutting down a tree in Istanbul or evicting a squat in Hamburg or Barcelona. Mainstream publications like The Guardian are beginning to run articles on the commons, heralding “a wave of disruption” that will challenge neoliberalism.

And the politics of urbanisation now generates considerable interest, with prominent blogs and web magazines dedicating considerable space to polemics on Richard Florida’s creative-class oriented approach to “urban renewal” or Neil Smith and David Harvey’s critique of gentrification and city branding. We are also seeing the rise of what I’d argue has become a sub-genre of internet literature, namely, the pseudo-Marxist think-piece on hipsters and gentrification.

Most importantly, we are seeing more and more attempts by ordinary citizens to take back what is rightfully theirs, what is rightfully everyone’s. Over the next several weeks, we will tell some of those stories. It’s true that we are not going to change the world with one or two urban gardens. But when we care for the seeds planted in the gaps of a hollow system, we are choosing to cultivate the living city and leave the dead weight of urbanisation behind. And who knows what may tremble beneath the cobblestones?

Municipal Tremors – Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons teaser (Spain Medialab) from Doc Next Network on Vimeo.

European cities for the commons is an editorial partnership supported by Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons, a Doc Next Network project.

This article was originally published in Open Democracy

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